


Is This Love Then, This Red Material

by stella_bella



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bloodplay, M/M, Post-Hell, Religious Blasphemy, Torture, post series 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 20:28:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1360702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stella_bella/pseuds/stella_bella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU where Sam rescues Dean from Hell after the Season 3 finale, but they don't come back the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is This Love Then, This Red Material

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the poem "An Appearance" by Sylvia Plath.
> 
> This is one of the first things I ever wrote for this fandom (like five years ago now) that I unearthed and polished up a little. Feedback is always appreciated!

The smell of blood is familiar. Comforting. It weights her hair like a caress, flakes from her lips when she rasps over them with her tongue, and even when she sleeps, her dreams drip red behind her eyes.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been here, chained and small and covered in dry, sticky red like a blanket. Maybe she’s always been here. She was born, kicking and screaming and bloody, and that’s how she stayed.

During the day, when light slides fingers through the boarded-up windows, she sees that some of the blood is dark, almost black. Some of it is still red, but that will darken before the day is over, before the sun withdraws from the windows and the light fades. When night falls, everything will be black.

And in the blackness they will come for her.

They never asked her name, never told her theirs. Doesn’t matter, though, because she knows who they are. And sometimes, late at night, when they have gone early and left her mind intact; when the sweet-metal-sick smell of the blood isn’t as suffocating; sometimes, then, she remembers why she’s here.

What she did.

\---

It was a bar. Any bar, every bar. Red neon signs in the window, dark knotty wood floors scarred with stool legs and boots, spit and puke and time. It was nighttime, a gale, the wind gusting rain in staccato bursts against the small windows, truckers and punks ducking under the awnings, jacket collars popped, hoodies up.

She was wearing a black miniskirt, a tube top, a scattering of raindrops on her bare shoulders; the borrowed scent of sandalwood and tiger lily meant to mask her desperation.

It’d been two weeks since Justin skipped town, left her with a couple hundred in greasy twenties and limp fives. With an empty refrigerator and a small village of stubborn roaches behind the lower cabinets; a stolen futon with patched sheets and a bad taste in her mouth.

She had a nowhere job, working retail in a dying tourist trap downtown, across from a block of businesses that turned over every six or seven months. She lived a nowhere life, in a small town that people saw through the rolled-up windows of cars, air-conditioning and steel like a shield. A drive-by town.

She had no car, no education beyond the tenth grade. No parents, no family, and now no boyfriend, no ticket out.

She drew a finger through the ring of condensation next to her beer glass, making a pie chart. A peace sign. Trying to look approachable and mysterious, a woman of the world. Instead, she felt like a teenager at a dance, wearing mom’s inexpertly applied lipstick and a girlfriend’s borrowed clothes.

The bar was crowded, full of regulars and passers-by; mechanics, truck drivers, store clerks and construction workers. No knights, no shining armor. She studied the sea of people, and lingered on the truckers who clustered around the far end of the bar; imagined blowing one of them in the front seat of their rig in exchange for a ride out.

Raucous laughter rose from the group like the steam off of their wet clothes, a tangle of plaid and denim, leather and wool. One of them smiled, yellow and crooked; his gold front tooth winked at her out of an ash-flecked beard. There are always limits, even to desperation, and so she stayed put and waited.

The front door opened, sending a whirl of cold air at her back, making her shudder and smudge her temporary artwork.

And then he came in. And she should have known, oh god she should have known.

\---

A door slams somewhere above. She jerks, hot and cold and terrified, heartbeat loud enough to reverberate in her chest. The adrenaline makes her sick and dizzy, and she wonders somewhere in the cobwebs behind her eyes if there’s a finite supply, a reservoir in her veins, if it will run dry. If the body will realize that there will be no fighting or fleeing, only surrender.

She thinks that might be good, better than this false hope for rescue, for redemption.

They haven’t been to see her all day. That’s bad news, because it’s not a reprieve, it’s a waiting game. It’s them biding their time, getting stronger.

And every time they come, she is weaker, withering in the dark that closes in like the velvet insides of a confessional, that turns her into a child, afraid of the dark and the priests and the hand of God.

The fear would rise up during mass, and she would run out of the double doors and gulp the air, clear and bright and free of incense and suspicion. Her mother would follow, lips thin and patience thinner, and she would go to school the next day, bruised around the eyes.

She wonders how long she’s been in here, how long it’s been since she was able to tip her face up to the sky and breathe.

\---

She stopped breathing when she saw him. She wasn’t the only one.

He walked in with a swagger and a head tilt. The entire room shifted slightly around him, conversations dropping, gazes swiveling as the people realigned like iron filings to true north.

He headed straight for the bar, and the noise level picked up again, the magnetic lines settling. She heard nothing but a perfect silence.

He ordered a shot of something, whiskey maybe, and downed it in one gulp, long throat working, and greedily she stored up every move, every shift and breath and finger tap.

At first, she didn’t understand. He wore jeans and boots, a battered leather jacket and a plain black shirt. Nothing fancy, nothing different. Hell, probably a dozen guys already there were dressed the same exact way.

But then he turned, feeling the pressure of her gaze, and in his eyes were the knight and the armor and the warhorse, and she understood.

It was stupid, so stupid. Her mother had always said that she was going to get into trouble one day because she didn’t pay attention. And then her mother up and died before she got a chance to be proven right.

She would have been pissed about that.

\---

There are footsteps overhead. She shivers, counting the steps and her heartbeat, counting until she is praying, automatically, reverting to the child of long ago, locked in the darkness of her closet while her mother walked the floors.

There was glitter all over them, red and pink. Valentine’s Day had brought little fat cupid window decals and pink heart streamers to her second grade classroom, and she dropped the card she made on the way home because the slush had melted and refrozen and the ice was deceptive. So she made a new one, sprawled on the living room floor, and her mom had let the chops burn while she yelled and yelled.

The red glitter was swept and scrubbed, her knuckles raw on the broom handle, but she still found specks years later, sunk into the cracks between the floorboards, and her mother made her say a Hail Mary for every single one.

And she says one now, for the specks she missed, the ones stuck under her nails, along her hairline, but she can’t scrub them off, can’t sweep them away. Her arms are heavy and cold, and she wears her heart on her skin this time, haloed in flame.

The footsteps stop, and return, the floorboards shaking above her head, and she tilts her head back, feeling a shower of sawdust on her eyelids, like glitter, like ash.

\---

He had the most gorgeous eyes she ever saw. And she tells herself that’s why. That’s why she was so stupid, that’s why she didn’t see.

They were green and gold and hazel, pools in the summer forest, and in them she could drown herself; drown her desperation and fear and melt the everlasting winter of her life.

She slid off the barstool, ran a hand through her carefully tousled hair. Took one last drink and a deep breath, sauntered over.

His lips were wet from the drink, soft and firm around words that she couldn’t focus on. He kept shifting out of focus, pulling away, lines of his body hard underneath the worn leather even as he wavered like a mirage. His gaze was perfunctory, only his head tilted towards her, no heat in his voice or those eyes.

She supplied that instead, hot and burning like a July sun. Thinking, this is it, this is my chance. Seeing a sleek car and the endless road, laughter and the clunk of cassette tapes, bad coffee and early morning smiles. She saw, so quickly, a life she could have, just out of reach.

And then she reached out. And touched his arm with her hand.

\---

The door at the top of the stairs opens, and light spills out. She blinks and squints, twisting away in her bonds, curve of spine and limb graceful in its grotesquery. As the boots thud down the stairs, she closes her eyes and savors the last few seconds to herself.

He stops in front of her with a smile like his knife, sharp and deadly.

Because she is human, she thinks only about the pain when she’s alone, and when he is there, she thinks only about being alone. She doesn’t know what he thinks about, but has a feeling it might have eyes like the ones she sees in her dreams, right before they turn to nightmares.

\---

The second she put her hand on his arm, his gaze became a dagger. It pinned her, stabbed through clear to the other side, and sweat ran down her spine like blood.

And that’s when she saw him, the other one. How he got in without attracting notice, she would never know. He was ten feet tall and three feet wide, a bronzed god with a breastplate of plaid and hands like the last word.

This is what she got for never listening to her mom, for running away at sixteen from home and school and a life that promised a minivan and two point five kids and a beer-bellied husband and Normal. For not paying attention.

It’s always the quiet ones that you should fear, and she knew this, she did, it was her mother’s lesson at age five, taught with a belt in one hand and a rosary in the other. And this one had learned it well, had learned how to hide in plain sight, to cloak a king in a peasant’s garb, a college boy’s guileless smile.

They were point and counterpoint, subdued beauty and incandescent brilliance, light caught and refracted and multiplied.

She was in trouble now. And for a second she saw another path behind a closing door, which ended with her on her knees in a footwell littered with soda cups and old French fries, while Gold Tooth fisted his greasy hands in her hair and smacked his rubbery lips to the rhythm. By dawn, she’d have been hours away, slumped against a grey window, the cool glass like a caress on her sore jaw.

But that is not her. Not this time. She didn’t get out.

The knight smiled, and it was not a smile. The king leaned forward, and his shadow swallowed her up.

Where they touched, heat rose in waves, an expanding halo of flame that burned everything to ash but left them untouched, a holy relic passed over.

The knife was sharp and long, and the last thing she saw was a fan of eyelashes on freckled cheekbones, lips parted soft and warm; a long-fingered hand wrapped possessively around a throat. And then the pain rolled in and pulled her down into darkness.

\---

Justin used to drape his arm across the back of her chair, her Salvation Army sofa, the patched front seat in the Volvo that was older than both of them. She always felt caged when he did that, pinned down in a relationship, in a crummy leaky apartment, in a tiny empty town.

She misses that arm now, wonders if it curls around another girl in another city. Wonders if she had woken that morning, if he would have taken her with him. She thinks she wouldn’t mind feeling suffocated.

Black swims behind her eyes, and a voice croons over screaming that seems to come from the walls, the floor, from the lifeless swaths of color.

He asks and asks, never yells or demands, just asks over and over.

She has no answer. Her sins go unspoken, and the blackness rises up from the floor and buries her with a sigh. She doesn’t mind that it feels like suffocating.

\---

That first night, she thought they would kill her, rape her, hack her limbs and bury them around the town.

That would have been kinder.

Instead, they planted her in the basement with one-inch chain and made her watch.

But even if he hadn’t held a loaded gun to her head, she would not have been able to look away. He leaned against the opposite wall, shirtless and glowing; sweat and reflected light making him shine, painting him in armor.

He kept the gun pointed at her head, between her eyes, and the glint off of the mother-of-pearl handle reminded her of a time when she was young and her grandmother still nurtured those day lilies at her grandfather’s grave, the ones that died every night as the sun faded, leaving their pale corpses to shine in the light of a sickle moon, beautiful and tragic and ghostly, like this.

The gun held steady, even as his other hand dropped downwards to tangle and twist in shaggy brown hair, a crown for a king who worshipped on his knees, whose hymns were wordless and wet. The gun trembled.

She remembers the contrast of long tan fingers on pale skin, counting a rosary of ribs and hipbones; holding and pressing and drawing out wordless cries like a prayer. She remembers the eyes that pulled her in, a pool that had swallowed the forest, that swallowed the earth; remembers them pulling her deeper and deeper and down until he closed them in surrender.

When he came, a name on his lips whispered softer than an amen, softer than her grandmother’s dying petals, he let the gun drop, and she held her breath for the shot.

He raised the king from the floor, ran a hand up his chest to cup his face in benediction. The kiss was long and slow and burned itself onto the inside of her eyelids. Strong hands gripped hair and pulled back, exposing a throat with a leaping pulse. He bit down, lips swollen like ripe buds, like wine, and the faithful shuddered in ecstasy.

They left her alone in the dark, and it was empty like the sky without a moon.

\---

The tall one cut into her two days later. She already knew she wasn’t going to get out.

She had nowhere to look but at him, at the knight who leaned against the stair rail with all the casualness of the devout at the auto-da-fé while the king pronounced judgment; a knife like a white-hot flame and a smile like a horror story.

He sliced once, across her stomach, to spatter the first droplets on the wall behind her.

And when he was done, his hands were gloves of red, two glowing coals in the dark. The kiss was bruising and hot, and when they were done, they were both streaked with red, with her blood like anointing oil on bodies that gleamed unholy with lust.

She did not understand, how the same hands could draw shrieks from her, moans from his knight. How his smile could cut her like a knife, and then turn and grow soft with promise. How he could bring pleasure and pain, and the knight with the shining shattered armor could just watch, and smile, like every monster in every closet, half in the shadow and blocking the light.

There was blood behind that smile, steel and pain and the dark edges of things that made her skin prickle. She knew that he was being kind, then, in letting his king play. She saw Something that lurked under his skin, that shifted and flexed at the sight of blood; Something that was darker than black, older than time, and it yawned and curled and opened slitted eyes to lick its lips.

But it would settle, and sleep, whenever the king touched him; gentle, caressing. He could lull it to sleep with soft kisses and words whispered too low for her to hear, and she was grateful for that at least, did not ever want to know.

Even though she was the one immobile, the victim at the stake, she was the intruder, the blasphemer, the damned.

\---

She died on a Monday afternoon, chained in the basement of an abandoned house outside of town.

The found her two weeks later, and by that time it was no longer a crime scene.

It was a small, slumped figure staked to the floor, crucified in the center of a radiating spiral of color that pulsed black-red; a child’s fingerpainted arts and crafts. The officers and the techs did not know what to say, or do, and ever after they would dream of blood, always blood, the taste flaking from their lips when they woke.

She was a work of art, a masterpiece, a study in possession.

\---

Two states away, a witch died slow, on pyre of her house because why not, and their smiles were medieval.

Maybe we shouldn’t’ve done that to the girl.

She touched you.

Yeah, but dude, lots of people have touched me.

Not anymore.

And they burned hotter than the fire.


End file.
